The following is an interview with me conducted by the Italian architectural magazine Architetti Roma. This one focuses on issues of mobility and, as always, I hope you find it illuminating.

What are the urban contexts where technology and mobility have brought about the best outcomes?
To clarify, here we should make it plain that we’re strictly talking about networked information technology, and not, say, developments in power-train technology or materials engineering. And of relatively recent developments in this field, I’m particularly fond of a smartphone app called Citymapper. It’s like being handed the keys to the city.

Consider that I arrived in megacity London with nothing more than the vaguest mental map of the place, and still less of a sense of how to get around it. And what Citymapper let me do was dive right in, the night I got here. I could hop on a bus and go meet friends, and know exactly where I had to wait, what bus to take, where to get off and how long the trip would take me. It radically lowered the threshold of fear and uncertainty that keeps us sequestered in our local neighborhoods. Not within the weeks or months that it might have taken me to wrap my head around the transit network’s endlessly ramified field of possibilities in any previous age — immediately. And this is a service that’s available for zero incremental cost, to anyone with the wherewithal to afford a smartphone and a data plan. Now that is truly radical, a truly epochal development in urban mobility.

There are only two issues with it, really. The first is that Citymapper only works so well in London because TfL, our local transit authority, offers a generous selection of real-time APIs, the open application programming interfaces that allow a service like Citymapper to grab, represent and make use of that information. It wouldn’t be nearly the same thing in a city that didn’t, just not at all the same proposition.

The second, more serious problem is that Citymapper — like all other services positioned as products in the late-capitalist marketplace — is subject to churn. It’s not stable. A new version can appear at any time, might even be pushed to your device in such a way that you don’t get to choose whether you want it or not, and you’ll find that the features, conventions and metaphors you’ve come to rely upon and stored in muscle memory just don’t work the same way anymore. And if Citymapper’s CEO decides that his personal future and his investors’ outcomes are best secured by choosing to sell the service in toto to Apple or Google, then that’s what’s going to happen. And there’s not a damn thing you or I or anyone outside that decision loop can do about it.

So, yes: we’ve been handed the keys to the city, but they can be yanked away at any time. At any moment, TfL can decide that it no longer wants to provide real-time APIs, Citymapper can decide that it no longer wants to support a given city, Apple can decide that it no longer wants to allow third-party journey-planning services on its platform. Our golden age is real, but it’s terribly vulnerable.

Are you familiar with Rome? What in your opinion are the technology applications that could be suitable for Rome?
I’ve only spent three days in Rome in my adult life. I just don’t think I’m qualified to speak in anything more than generalities about what might or might not work there. But, sure, in any place where there’s a single accountable public transit authority, and that transit authority offers reliable real-time APIs, there’s no reason that something like Citymapper couldn’t work and work well.

Roman traffic is also, of course, legendary, and that’s something I can very easily see yielding to automated vehicle control. The deeper question there is the extent to which Romans actually cherish the impossibility of getting around, as part of their identity in the world. Letting go of that may be more of a obstacle than any of the material challenges of implementing automated mobility.

Considering Uber and similar services, do you think they are a positive solution for urban mobility?My position on Uber is rather well-known.

Google’s self-driving car has just been presented. Do you think it will catch on? In what time frame?
Well, firstly, I think Google itself is further away from fielding a solution that will work anywhere outside of Mountain View than is generally understood. The media hype has been very misleading. And secondly, Google is far from the only actor currently working to resolve this envelope of challenges. Despite their power, reach and influence, we should never make the mistake of collapsing the ideas of “autonomous personal transportation” and “Google.”

That said, it will happen, one way or another. I don’t think it’s a question of “catching on,” so much as one of getting the necessary regulatory, legislative and risk-assessment frameworks in place. And this is one of those very rare contexts where I believe that the information-technological approach really is unambiguously superior to the way we do things now.

In the United States alone, we sacrifice more than 30,000 human lives a year to misplaced confidence in our own ability to manage the performance regime presented to us by the car. People drive drunk, while texting, when they’ve just had an argument with their partner. Long-distance truckers drive bent half out of their mind on sleeplessness and crank because that’s what’s demanded of them by the economics of contemporary logistics. People drive in the morning to minimum-wage jobs that are two hours away because they’re the only ones that were on offer, on sleep that’s already been brutally truncated by the two hours it took them to get home the night before. People use vehicles as weapons — to bolster their sense of self, to claim space from the others they feel encroaching on them at every turn, to assert dominance in a world that makes them feel like they’ve been zeroed out. And algorithms even at their clumsiest stand to do a better job in each and every single one of these circumstances.

But “unambiguously better” doesn’t mean “perfect.” The disruption, in particular, to working-class livelihoods will be dreadful. If unanticipated, unaccounted for and unresponded to, in fact, I venture to say it will cause misery easily on the order of those 30,000 annual deaths. And that’s quite a thing to say. It’s why I support the provision of universal basic income, to at least buffer the havoc automation is sure to wreak on our societies as it transforms mobility, logistics and a thousand other fields.

Could you draw some possible scenarios regarding the use of technologies in the field of mobility ten years from now?
Ten years is a long, long time in my field. It’s the far future. Consider that ten years ago, we didn’t even have smartphones. Given all the wildly interacting factors at play, and the ever-present likelihood that their interaction will render our world effectively ungovernable, I’m just not comfortable prognosticating.

The following is a short but rather chewy interview with me, conducted by Karol Piekarski for Medialab Katowice. I hope you enjoy it.

KP: It seems you’ve become quite pessimistic about the prospects of the public in the networked society (your weekly Dispatch, number 27), pointing out to the fact that for some reason we are not so willing to use creatively available data processing technologies. What if we look at this problem from a broader perspective? It took hundreds years for the basic literacy (writing and reading) to spread around the society. Although we may feel that invention of the World Wide Web was ages ago, in fact it’s just a beginning of the “new medium.” Maybe we “simply” need time to learn how to use, as a society, digital technologies?

AG: Well, I think we need to consider how rapidly we as consumers and users of technical systems can develop the critical literacy you’re talking about, versus the headway that those who are not concerned with such matters can make in the meantime.

I don’t even mean necessarily that the designers of emerging interactive products and services are consciously acting out of any set of values I might disagree with. I simply mean that portable, modular code can be recombined by some third party into really pernicious systems, readily and rapidly, either out of ignorance or what I would regard as malicious intent. By the time we figure out how to use these systems wisely, or come to a collective determination that we reject their use, the damage will have been done.

And even that’s assuming that we are more or less static, as subjects and users. The truth is that we are acted on by these technologies, as individuals and as societies both.

So the relative power of a particular kind of personality type or learning style may come into the ascendance, and reinforce the conditions of its own vitality, while making it very difficult for anyone else to even sustain themselves. For example, introverts have never had it easy, but now, in our world of continuous mandatory self-performance, they run the risk of being more marginalized and overlooked than ever. We know that success under the new dispensation requires more than the occasional schmoozing that might have seen you through in the past. It requires not merely that you make yourself continuously available, not merely that you have the energy — the psychic and the financial wherewithal — to socialize and network, but that you are seen to socialize and network and to be the kind of person who enjoys doing so. And that’s in large part a consequence of the way we’ve chosen to integrate always-on social networking technologies into our everyday lives.

You could argue, with some justice, that the world has always selected for some personality types over others — that there’s nothing fundamentally new here, it’s just that the place where our culture has decided the grandeur ought to live is shifting. But I’ve always thought that the point of our work was to imagine futures that were more just and equitable, not merely a new and different unequal distribution of power.

KP: Smart cities vs. smart citizens, government or corporation vs. people – we still tend to build these clear oppositions. Do you think that juxtaposing “centralized” against “distributed” can really help explain the mechanisms of power in the networked society? Or maybe we need a bit more sophisticated approach to understand what is actually going on (thinking here about the “society of control” or the work of Alexander Galloway)?

AG: It strikes me that there are a few different concerns bundled up in this question, and that we might benefit from unpacking them and considering them separately.

First, there’s the question of what we mean when we refer to something as a network. The dominant political tenor of the early mass Internet was a kind of structural determinism we associate with folks like John Perry Barlow. The idea was that the network principle of structuration itself, as supposedly immanent in the distributed topology of the World Wide Web, wasn’t merely inherently morally superior to organizational schemes based on hierarchy and coercion, but was practically superior, too. It would therefore “naturally” underwrite a spontaneous mass restructuring of society along horizontal or rhizomatic lines.

We know now, of course, that that didn’t happen, and it’s reasonable to ask why that is. Alex’s great contribution, in Protocol, was to remind us that the Internet as we know it has never been anything but a monstrous hybrid. Its functioning depends on the interaction of two very different ways of organizing the transmission and reception of information: a highly centralized and hierarchical addressing scheme called the Domain Name System, and a radically distributed messaging protocol we call TCP/IP. Only one of these “routes around failure” in the rhizomatic way so beloved of the early net theorists, while the other remains radically vulnerable to (say) State efforts to interdict the free flow of information. So, far from spontaneously giving rise to some antiauthoritarian, horizontalist utopia, while it’s fair to say that the Internet does tend to destabilize certain existing power relations, just as often it reproduces the selfsame dynamics of power that existed beforehand.

And that leads to our closely-related second question, which is how we should consider the relationship between structure and agency. The fundamental mistake that network determinists very often make is to treat people like Internet switches, or the consensing bees Thomas Seeley depicts so beautifully in his book Honeybee Democracy. They assume that, given a certain topology of organization and the logics of informational flow that attend it, certain macro-scale political outcomes will necessarily follow.

I think there is a broadly observable trend toward networked structures showing up in places we might not historically have expected them to — in the large-scale capitalist commercial enterprise, for example. But just because an organization’s practical, day-to-day decision-making is nominally organized horizontally doesn’t mean the workers who use it on the job carry that logic into the other spheres of their life. And it certainly doesn’t mean that those workers can’t be fired just like people who work for more consciously and avowedly hierarchical organizations. Ask all the liberated, Holocratic non-managers Tony Hsieh just let go from Zappos where they think power lies.

Finally, there’s the question of how we model the relationship between openness and power. We know by now that it’s a terrible error to assume that there’s a necessary connection between radical openness and a liberatory or emancipatory politics. If anything, you could be forgiven for concluding just the opposite: that there’s been a fair amount of what Marcuse would call repressive desublimation, Gamergate being the preeminent case in point.

In fact, we have to ask if openness and mobility and the apparent freedom to act aren’t qualities that can easily be leveraged by parties acting in ways that are contrary to our own understanding of our interests. This is what I take Deleuze to be arguing in the “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” and it’s at the heart of governmentality theory.

So if neither distributed organizational topologies nor horizontal decision-making nor radical transparency and openness necessarily buy you equity and justice, it’s appropriate to ask: what would? And the only answer I have is that you have to fight directly for equity and for justice. You have to believe in and want those things first, and the tools that support them will follow, will be discovered or invented. But you can’t first build the tool and suppose that progressive values and organizing logics will flow outward from it — certainly not in any straightforward or uncomplicated way.

I should point out that this is something I’ve had to learn the hard way my ownself.

KP: Living in a globalised world, we tend to universalise the discourse around digital technologies, especially their relationship to society. It’s visible in your work that you try to put more attention to those less privileged in order to figure out whether any of our networked/digital solutions could actually make their life better. Poland is an interesting example: behind the western world, but way ahead the most economically deprived countries. You’ve spent some time in Poland recently, if you were to advise Polish government, universities or companies, what you would suggest to spend the money on in terms of innovation and development?

AG: I guess I would start by asking what ends and goals you’re trying to work toward. You know I completely reject the point of view that says Poland or anyone else necessarily needs to do what everyone else is doing, needs to accept anyone else’s definitions of “advanced” or “innovative” or “highly developed.”

It’s a phrase which has sadly taken on a fairly bourgeois coloration, but I still think there’s something to be said for “quality of life.” And I don’t think there’s any inherent correlation — and I should be very clear: neither a direct nor an inverse correlation — between economic development in the abstract and quality of life. Tokyo is certainly one of the safest, most “advanced,” most efficient and highly-developed cities on the planet, but the regnant xenophobia and gender politics you find there make it a place I can’t imagine wanting to return to, except as a visitor. The “quality of life” there mostly resolves to a continually refined, absolutely state-of-the-art consumerism. By contrast, most everyone can think of places that are maybe a little run-down, maybe even a little sketchy at times, but where more of your time is your own, you aren’t quite as hemmed in by the pressures of conforming to some model of appearance and self-presentation, and in general life is more spacious. So the first part of my advice to Poles would be to weigh with the most exceeding care what already works about the way you live, and not be in any particular hurry to overwrite it with modes of being someone living a million miles away who’s never once set foot in your culture assures you is the new hotness.

The flipside of this, of course, is not clinging to things that clearly aren’t working, just because they’re the ways in which things have always been done. Racism, sexism and homophobia — like ageism and ableism and hierarchical orderings in general — sure are traditional, just about everywhere. But that doesn’t for one hot second mean I think they’re worth respecting and holding onto. And this goes for organizational and technical matters as well. The bottom line is that you’ve got to keep your eye firmly fixed on what kind of frame for living you’re trying to bring into being, and absolutely refuse to let yourself get distracted, whether by notional hipness and the fetishism of emergent technology, or by appeals to stability and tradition for their own sake.

This coming June, I’ve been invited to offer a keynote that will function as a hinge between two complementary events of Berlin’s Make City Festival 2015: a workshop called “Science Fictions: Smartology as a New Urban Utopia” on Friday the 19th, followed by a public symposium called “Beware of Smart People! Re-defining the Smart City Paradigm towards Inclusive Urbanism” that takes place on Friday and Saturday the 20th both.

As part of the run-up to the events, the organizers asked me to answer a few questions for a newspaper they’re putting together for free distribution at the Festival. I’ve reproduced this interview below, and hope, as ever, that you enjoy it.

Why is the “Smart City” relevant to a broader public?
It’s only relevant because at the moment this is the predominant conception of the way in which networked information technology ought to be deployed in cities to aid in their management and governance, and it encodes within it a pathetically circumscribed vision of urban citizenship. As far as classic conceptions of the smart city are concerned, your sole job as a citydweller is to generate data which can be captured, analyzed and acted upon by administrators — those are the limits of participation.

Another way of putting it: If the municipality you live in buys and deploys this technology, your life will be affected by it, whether you particularly care about this thing we call the “smart city” or not. Your choices will be conditioned, your scope of action curtailed, and your ability to shape the circumstances of your own life constrained, in ways that might not appear immediately obvious, for the ultimate advantage of others. You do not have a voice other than in the aggregate. And while this is a rather bleak prospect, it’s easily enough avoidable if enough people come to understand what’s at stake in the deployment of these technologies, and refuse to let it unfold unchallenged.

How can a focus on people as urban knowledge producers help to redefine the technology and market oriented concept of the Smart City?
That’s a pretty abstract and, to my way of thinking, overly intellectualized way of framing what it is we do as residents of an urban place and as participants in a community. Do we “produce knowledge”? Yes, of course we do: at all times, all of us, both individually and collectively. We produce knowledge about place, most of which is and only ever can be tacit, and it’s important to understand that this is what ordinary people are in fact doing as they pursue the course of their everyday lives. It’s not, or not exclusively, the regime of experts and specialists.

But is that the best — the most satisfying or resonant — way to construct what it is we do as city people? I would argue that it isn’t. I would, in fact, argue that in a sense it dovetails all too well with the command-and-control model implicit in the smart city rhetoric, because if we’re all “urban knowledge producers,” the implication is that some sufficiently subtle array of technical systems will be able to capture that knowledge, derive actionable inferences from it and make it available to be acted upon remotely.

So I prefer to focus on participation. I prefer to understand everyone in the city as an actor, an active and vital contributor — someone who is capable of mobilizing knowledge and bringing it to bear on the matters of concern they themselves perceive.

How can smart people become active participants in new urban governance models based on knowledge sharing and coproduction?
Understand that I’m not at all interested in “smart,” in smart anything. What I am interested in is creating circumstances in which ordinary citydwellers are able to acquire an refined understanding of all the circumstances that shape their participation in civic life, whether those circumstances are technical, political, economic or psychological.

We should, in particular resist the notion that every last citizen needs to acquire a high degree of specifically technical competence — the inane calls for everyone to learn to code, and so on. Not everyone has the cognitive propensity, not everyone has the ability, and quite simply not everyone wants to. But this is not the same thing as groups of neighborhood scale acquiring a greater collective sophistication as to how informational-technical systems work and what it is that they do. It’s crucial that we demystify these things, but it’s neither necessary or possible for everyone to acquire the habits of mind of a software engineer.

What we need, therefore, is for those who do have the propensity, the capability and the insight into the workings of technical systems to share that insight, in terms ordinary people can relate to. For many, it will mean developing a theory of mind that will guide them in understanding what it is that people don’t understand, and what metaphors are best suited to helping explain these systems and their functions without condescension or oversimplification.

Everybody who possesses comfort and competence with information-technical systems needs to realize that from now on, part of their job is to function as a translator. And this will be frustrating. There are literally different cognitive styles involved, different intelligences, and bridging between the divergent models of the world people hold, however unconsciously or inarticulately, is by no means a straightforward or a simple thing. But it’s not optional, not if we believe in the right of ordinary citydwellers to understand the systems that condition their everyday choices.

How do smart people redistribute urban resources and reconfigure urban spaces?
This is not, of course, a technical question. I personally believe we need to ensure that the information-technical systems which increasingly govern the distribution of (material-energetic, spatial, financial or attentional) resources in the city work in as self-explanatory a way as can possibly be achieved, and that the valuations bound up in them remain available for inspection and renegotiation at all times. But this ambition ultimately relies on how we choose to organize ourselves in a polity, what values we hold and enact in our collective decisions. We cannot achieve any such thing if we do not first believe we have the right and the affirmative obligation to do so, and in fact that the exercise of all our other rights will ultimately come to depend on our doing so.

I recently answered a few questions for the leading Korean architectural magazine, SPACE.

First, please state in a sentence your area of interest or expertise in the field of urban computing.

“Ensuring that to the greatest degree possible a robust conception of the right to the city is designed into networked informatic systems intended or otherwise destined for urban deployment.”

Second, an example that you use to make urban computing more readily accessible to architects is of Mark Weiser‘s concept of ubiquitous computing. How do you think functionality within the city divides from novelty or ‘art works’ of urban computing architecture? And which do you think architects can relate to more?

I think we long ago collectively transcended Weiser’s specific vision of technologized everyday life; as a matter of fact, I can tell you the precise date we did so, which was June 29th, 2007, the day on which the original iPhone was launched. What architects and urban planners now have to account for — but curiously, generally do not — is that the overwhelming majority of the human beings they’re designing spaces for are equipped with a way of knowing and making use of the city that no previous population has ever had before. We call it a “smartphone.”

What does it mean for a networked body and a networked self to move through equally networked space? And what might all of this portend for the practice of architecture, for the planning and execution of the built environment? As far as I can tell, these are questions that the disciplines involved haven’t even begun to reckon with in any particularly consistent or meaningful way.

The question about art is impossible to answer without reference to specific works or pieces or artists. Architects and urban planners might do well, in fact, to pay attention to the more thoughtful artists, or people involved in the critical making community, who have begun to interrogate the uses and consequences of information technology in a way that goes far beyond pointlessly “interactive” façades and mobile sculptures. But the kind of digital “art” installation that is generally used to apply a superficial gloss of contemporaneity or futurity to some otherwise utterly conventional commercial real-estate proposition? As far as I’m concerned it’s not even properly art, because it doesn’t satisfy the threshold condition of catalyzing some psychic or emotional change in the viewer, and of course it’s not meant to.

Your representative work Urbanflow examines the limitations of interactive media booths around cities, and looks to connect these booths while making them more behaviorally approachable. What other recent works have you been working on, and how do you feel the future of urban computing has been portrayed through this piece in terms of human behavior and adaptability to technologies?

Right now the thing I’m most interested in is designing for the future of urban mobility, for what I call “transmobility.” Unlike the transportation industry, whose rather boring, heavily capital-intensive conceptions of this future all seem to center on exotic new vehicle types or heroic infrastructures, what I’m trying to articulate is a framework allowing us to make maximum use of a city’s existing heterogeneous array of vehicles, mobility modes and options. Transmobility uses locational data and information-, interface- and service design to bind these things together in a mesh capable of providing something close to on-demand, real-time, point-to-point personal mobility to every citizen. Ultimately I think it’s a wiser, lower-cost and more practical way of achieving that end.

Urban computing is defined as “the integration of computing, sensing, and actuation technologies into everyday urban settings and lifestyles.” Yet, you register your work as belonging to the field of everyware (permeating places and pursuits, social activity, shaping relationships, as a distributed phenomenon). You mentioned that it is in need of a paradigm shift in 2011, has this happened? What is your definition for each of these concepts and how are they better suited in defining your approach in comparison to the term urban computing?

I just don’t use these terms in my work anymore. In fact I’m completely uninterested in technology, except insofar as it facilitates individual and collective self-determination, the meaningful expression of solidarity and the practice of mutual aid.

Think of it this way: networked informatic technology is simply another material we now have available to us as builders and shapers of urban space. And like any other material, it has certain inherent qualities, tendencies, properties or directionalities. But you don’t learn anything useful about these qualities by considering the material as an abstraction; the grain you’ve got to contend with as a designer only reveals itself at the local level — in technological terms, at the level of a specified device, sensor, display or API. And equally, these qualities only become important in context, when you’re designing some ensemble of networked systems in a given space, for a given population of users, to achieve a given effect.

So I try to avoid thinking in jargon, or otherwise succumbing to a uselessly generic conception of the material I’m working with, and focus my inquiry instead on actual communities in specific spatial contexts, their articulated and unarticulated concerns, the envelope of requirements and other constraints within which we work, and only finally the properties of some particular technical system.

You harshly criticize the top-down controlled, ubiquitous, smart city, designed by big operators for their own interests. But can cities tackle all the challenges without those big companies? Don’t you throw out the baby with the bathwater?

There are things, certainly, that industrial-scale vendors of infrastructural services and systems are very good at delivering to cities. Whether it’s wastewater treatment or the deployment and maintenance of street lighting or managing clean and safe demolition, that’s their competence, their domain of expertise, and I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that those of us without that experience know their job better than they do. The difference that arises with the “smart city” is that now some subset of these vendors have made an unwonted conceptual leap between whatever specific competence they’ve developed and the ambition to furnish municipal governments with a kind of general decision-support utility, without any particular understanding of or sensitivity to the unique complications of the terrain on which they propose to operate. And latent within almost all of these notions is some conception of municipal administration as an essentially rational and objective pursuit.

Well, of course, it’s anything but rational. It’s a fundamentally political pursuit, sweaty and unpretty and utterly lacking in closure. You can’t automate the complication out of it — or, for that matter, the accountability for having made a decision that necessarily deprived some one or party of access to some resource they regarded as rightfully theirs. I simply don’t believe that the process of governing is something that can be reduced to key performance indicators on a dashboard and optimized and made clean. And so far at least, that’s all the big IT vendors are offering.

No: Let them provide what they are so good at providing. There may not be much glamor in providing “dumb pipe,” but there’s honor aplenty. That ought to be enough.

Do many local governments share your vision? Do they have the intellectual and technical background to understand the ins and outs?

In my experience municipal administrators are not in the slightest degree stupid people, but by and large of course they don’t understand the intricacies of networked informatics or data, which is why some of them can from time to time find the superficially confident blandishments of solution integrators and management consultants so appealing. Fortunately, what they do tend to have a deep and intimate understanding of is the local social, institutional and political environment, and this very often gives them a firm platform from which to push back against some of the more foolish claims that are made for the promise of “smart cities.” It has nothing to do with whether or not they share my “vision.”

Are you afraid of the rise of a new kind of technocrats, that we could name “datacrats”?

Every new configuration of technical capability will tend to generate a stratum of people who are differentially skilled and confident in the use and practical application of that technology. As I see it, though, the point isn’t merely to trade one superficially hipper and trendier priesthood for another, it’s to prevent the emergence of such priesthoods in the first place.

Could you detail a few inspiring examples of cities which are dealing with their challenges with lucid, relevant solutions?

Dublin is doing some very interesting things, with their city council’s Beta Projects initiative. I’m impressed with Madrid’s administration that they had the maturity and wisdom to let the citizen-driven Campo de Cebada process unfold. And I know there are thousands upon thousands of people in local government around the world, generally but not exclusively younger, who understand the multiplex value proposition of efforts like these and would let them proceed if only they could. A big part of my job is to provide those people with resources that support their intuition, so they can make the internal case against the smart-city vendors and in favor of more fruitful directions.

What suggestions would you give to a mayor who is engaged in such a smart city program? To a mayor who has not yet chosen what to do?

To the former, I’d argue that so-called smart initiatives be subjected to the most rigorous oversight and accounting, in a effort to establish precisely who has benefitted from their introduction, and to what degree, and whether or not this observed distribution of benefits aligns with the claims that were made at project inception.

To the latter, I’d suggest that whatever it is they think they will achieve by engaging the incumbent vendors to deliver some smart city “solution,” there may be far better returns on investment to be realized economically, socially and strategically from smaller-scale, more locally-grounded and more thoughtful alternatives. And, of course, whatever promises they are made by those vendors, they should make sure to get it in writing.

Some problems raised by the smart city are linked to the huge amount of (personal) data they use for their tools: privacy, resilience, and blind technosolutionism in general. Do you think it’s time to “uncomputerize” our cities?

No, not at all. I think it’s time for the people living in each place on Earth to think carefully, collectively and consciously about what they want this class of technologies to do for them, and whether or not they think it’s capable of delivering on those expectations. And it’s the responsibility of any of us who do have some grounding in what networked digital information technology can and cannot do to explain and contextualize that technology for everyone else, so they’re more readily able to make those determinations.